A Close Reading of Vievee Francis' Poem "Waterfire"
A sort of walk through the old neighborhood for me. Sort of.
I arrived in Providence, RI, in September of 1993 to begin my freshman year of college. At that time, the city was only beginning to see the changes that would become known as the “Providence Renaissance” a few years later; downtown still felt boarded-up and burned out, and there wasn’t much reason for a college kid — even a curious one like me — to spend time there. But Buddy Cianci was mayor, and under his administration, the city invested in the arts as part of the plan to revitalize the economy and attract tourists. Buddy Cianci, for those who may be unfamiliar, was what some people might kindly describe as “a character.” Still, in many ways the city improved under his leadership. (Aside from the Providence Place Mall, which I still consider to be an atrocity, an eyesore, and a cultural vacuum — and not just because its construction was the reason my favorite diner no longer exists.) It was because of Cianci that the Woonasquatucket River was unburied in downtown Providence, forming an integral part of Waterplace Park, the site of the art installation known as Waterfire.
The brilliant and wonderful poet Vievee Francis wrote the poem I’m reading today, “Waterfire,” many years after I left the city of Providence; it appears in her 2015 collection Forest Primeval, a book I return to again and again, always finding something newly resonant each time I pick it up.
Vievee will be reading with the equally brilliant and wonderful Bonita Lee Penn for What The Universe Is: A (Virtual) Reading Series on January 21, 2025, at 7:30pm on Zoom. Registration is free and easy at bit.ly/WTUIJan2025. Something tells me this reading will be a vital counterpoint to any buffoonery and shenanigans occurring elsewhere this week.
And now to the poem:
Waterfire We were walking by the man-made river where a city walked so slowly along its banks it seemed part of the current itself, and every few feet a fire burned, the cauldron fires that smelled of flesh, though I knew it to be only heartwood thrown by the bare-chested men onto the flames. For a moment I forgot where I was, and heard, a chanting. A lowing from the waters. We followed the shore. There were kernels of corn, small explosions in great oiled kettles being turned then poured into bags and cones. We ate more than we needed as we talked about your future, despite the past seeming to fill the air with smoke. I said, In this place I imagine civility just giving way. Along the man-made river, we walked, and the boats almost beside us full of those you said “meant to be seen,” but I knew otherwise as I pictured myself weightless upon that close current, indivisible: skin, wood, water, fire. As people waved you went on—about Beauty and how there simply wasn’t enough of it. . .
This poem thrums with tension — we have the intimacy of these two friends strolling together, deep in conversation, but it is juxtaposed against the scene in which they’re strolling. Just about every image suggests peril: the “cauldron fires that smelled / of flesh,” the chants that sound like “a lowing from the waters,” the “small explosions / in great oiled kettles,” the “past seeming to fill the air with smoke.” No wonder the speaker says “In this place I imagine / civility just giving way.” There is, indeed, something unsettling about seeing pyres burning in the middle of a river criscrossed with bridges as gondoliers ferry their passengers along past the flames. Waterfire didn’t start until after I’d moved out of Providence, but I’ve been back a few times, and it always strikes me as being something illicit, carnivalesque, a touch of menace released into our lives so that the deeper malevolence kept under pressure doesn’t overwhelm us.
But amidst the menace we still have these two people walking and talking, “following the shore” and eating popcorn while talking about the future — specifically, the future that the speaker’s friend is facing, which is ill-defined in the poem, though we can surmise that the speaker is not an optimist; let us not forget that they say “In this place I imagine / civility just giving way” while surrounded by crowds of revelers who gather to watch a river burn.
“Waterfire” is a poem that uses second-person address quite effectively; it allows us, the reader(s), to enter into the intimate space of the poem, even though only one of us could ever potentially be the person represented in the poem by the “you,” assuming that there is, indeed, an actual person who once strolled along the banks of the Woonasquatucket River with the poet, discussing an uncertain future. (This is not guaranteed, of course; poets are allowed to make things up as needed for the purposes of writing a poem.)
That “you,” though, raises the stakes for our involvement in the reading of the poem, and so the final stanza’s turn hits hard for me, as there’s a distance introduced between speaker and addressee:
Along the man-made river, we walked, and the boats almost beside us full of those you said “meant to be seen,” but I knew otherwise as I pictured myself weightless upon that close current, indivisible: skin, wood, water, fire. As people waved you went on—about Beauty and how there simply wasn’t enough of it. . .
The motion is still the same — the walking and talking along the river — but something has changed in the speaker’s perspective. The friend has drawn a distinction between the people on the banks and the people in the boats, suggesting that the people in the boats are as much a part of the spectacle of Waterfire as the fires themselves, but our speaker “knew otherwise,” and I believe they are imagining themselves entwined with the manifestation that is Waterfire, engaged on a physical level with its constituent elements, while the friend is oblivious to this change, speaking of the abstract notion of “Beauty / and how there simply wasn’t enough of it . . . “ The separation here suggests to me an unbridgeable schism — an unburied river, if you will — between these two formerly intimate friends. It may not be the death of their friendship, but the world won’t ever look the same as it had before, and this is where the poem trails off, suggestively using an ellipsis to mark the not-end.
It’s a sixteen-line snapshot, really, of this pivot point in a friendship, recognizing that change often is gradual until it isn’t, and that extraordinary settings may catalyze changes in perspective that will resonate outwards. It’s gorgeous work, and I find it deeply resonant.
If you also found it resonant, I hope you’ll tune in to hear Vievee read with Bonita Lee Penn for What The Universe Is: A (Virtual) Reading Series on Tuesday, November 21 at 7:30pm Eastern time on Zoom. Click on bit.ly/WTUIJan2025 to register.
And thanks for reading — 2025 is a good time to turn to poetry, don’t you think? I do.